You argue that the internet should be used for disruptive demonstration. Isn’t it already?Currently, the entire internet is private property. In the US, there are laws that protect freedom of political speech in “public areas” – sidewalks, roads and parks – where you can stand with your sign.

There aren’t spaces like that on the internet, even though it has become a very central location in many people’s lives. To say that, because of a technicality, the speech rights you have in other areas of your life simply don’t exist online would be to abdicate the power of the internet to corporations and governments who often have very little interest in challenging the status quo.

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One type of online protest overwhelms servers to crash websites. How does it work?An activist distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is essentially when you and your friends go to, say, whitehouse.gov and hit refresh a bunch of times to bring down the host server so that other people can’t access the site. Some of the early groups that used DDoS actions were basically street activists who moved to the internet. It was the digital equivalent of a sit-in or a street march.

In the 1990s, people could do this by going to a website and manually hitting refresh. That’s not really possible with modern web infrastructure, so hacktivists have developed tools to increase the traffic they can muster during these actions.

Doesn’t making online protests more efficient enter even murkier legal territory?During DDoS actions, groups like Anonymous have used botnets – which are controversial because they are typically groups of computers whose owners don’t know they’re infected. Using someone’s personal resources for your political purpose without their consent is problematic. Botnets, like DDoS actions, are illegal. But you can choose to volunteer and be part of a botnet.

You say hacktivist tools have been unfairly portrayed by the press. How so?After Anonymous coordinated a series of DDoS attacks against commercial websites in 2010, lots of reports suggested they were carried out by hackers who were scary and untouchable. They also claimed DDoS was some crazy new form of activism that was going to change everything. All of those claims turned out to be inaccurate.

Anonymous is made up of people with many different levels of technological proficiency. Many of those involved in the attacks were participating for the first time and used a flawed tool that did, in fact, enable people to be identified.

Should the law recognise online activism as legitimate civil disobedience?Current law in the US makes it very difficult to differentiate between crimes and acts of political activism. It also makes it likely that people who engage in this type of action will face felony convictions and massive damages and fines.

To legitimise things like activist DDoS actions, we need an overhaul of the legislation. Ultimately that would mean a ruling that forms of online activism can constitute political speech.

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Molly Sauter is an affiliate researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her new book is The Coming Swarm&colon; DDoS actions, hacktivism, andcivil disobedience on the internet (Bloomsbury)

This article appeared in print under the headline “Legalise digital protest”